[sp332]

The main reason 2.4GHz band is unlicensed (anyone can broadcast on it without e.g. a ham license) is because it's garbage. Baby monitors and microwave ovens are two of the most common offenders for dumping large amounts of noise into that band. If you can move the printer to a 5GHz band, that could help a lot.

And in the near future, wifi 6E will add a ton of spectrum, allowing devices to just avoid noisy channels. But to use that you'll have to upgrade the printer or add a wifi 6E bridge.

[EvanAnderson]

Had a Customer who complained that the Wi-Fi in one of their conference rooms was "always" unreliable. I checked it multiple times and didn't find any problems-- low SNR, strong signal, low airtime utilization.

Eventually I learned out that "always" meant a particular recurring lunchtime meeting, scheduled right when a steady stream of workers were going into the break room across the hall and heating food in a microwave oven.

[pixl97]

I had a Panasonic 2.4Ghz jamming device. Could take out channels 1-11 all at the same time. It wasn't supposed to be a jamming device, it was supposed to be a cordless phone. Setup wifi for a customer, and it worked fine when I was on site. Later the customer complained it was completely unusable, in what they thought was a random fashion.

Turned out whenever they used the cordless it pretty much made so much noise on the 2.4G frequence wifi wouldn't work. Phone itself worked fine. Had them get new phones and the problem went away.

[C1sc0cat]

I recall one of my colleagues at British telecom who told a story that when debugging random noise on the line.

It turned out to be the subscribers (a little old lady) budgie swinging on its perch was causing the problem.

[TeMPOraL]

Reminds me of a story from my colleague, who used to work at a tech help desk at a telecom some years ago. He told me about a curious case of a house which, despite being located next to the network node, appeared as if it was kilometers away from the signal loss POV. It turned out that for unknown reasons, instead of cutting the necessary length of cable to install, someone just connected both ends through a fresh cable spool and buried that spool underground.